Last week for me was one of those tunnels of endeavour you have to go through some times. It was made worse by the fact that I have a self-image of being someone who sits silk jacketed in the bay window of the morning room lingering over breakfast while watching the kingfishers bling the pool with their blue jewellery.

But machinery was rumbling in the fields around and nature hates a vacuum, so I was made to scurry about in a last bout of autumnal catch up work. Just to leaven the mixture of combining, baling, TB testing and calving, I had two punctures, two drive belts break, a hydraulic hose burst and a shower in warm diesel. The smell still lingers on me when it gets warm in the drawing room.

I didn’t want to become so involved with farming when we moved here, but farmers don’t like seeing an able bodied person idling, as they perceive it. So I ended up bring in the last straw bales on Sunday night having worked up and down the hidden fields through the sunset amongst pheasants making their evening calls. As I turned the machine off a skein of geese caught the last light and left a `v’ shaped image hanging in the still air.

The straw is a dull grey this year and the bales look dead against the few golden bales left over from the previous summer. They glow in the barn, golden memories, precious thoughts that lift you when you look at the uncertain future.

Encouraged by the rough nature of the work, I started El Guapo yesterday. The ground shook and birds fell out of the sky. El Guapo (in Spanish it means The Handsome One, in Argentina it is usually a tough fighting man who attracts women, why is that?) is a sixteen ton tracked digger that I bought at a farm sale. Small trees have taken root on its counterweight and nettles grow in the cab, the teeth on its battered bucket stick out like guns from a fort. This machine lives by the muckheap and, when I can get it started, it can do a week’s work in an hour. It leaves you feeling glutted with power like Golem with his Precious, both shaken and stirred.

But then I noticed that El Guapo’s bucket is swinging a bit loosely, as if his wrist has gone limp. Should I cure him or buy a nice cushion to cover up the seat that has been eaten by wasps (pronounced waasups round here)? And is that rust on the cab or has it developed a David Dickinson tan? I have to say, he looks quite romantic in the steam of a freshly turned muckheap under the moonlight with his medallion swinging. I wonder if women will still be drawn to his power?

The week has left me feeling good, and I watched this clip again because the lead singer looks just like my elder brother who is something important in our little world and gets cross when I send it to him. I don’t care, he used to shoot me when I was little.